The most interesting thing about the row over Sebastian Faulks's views on the Quran is that it hasn't happened. Faulks told an interviewer that the Quran was "the rantings of a schizophrenic", though this might be qualified by his also explaining that John the Baptist was clearly another mentally ill character. He went on to criticise the book by comparison with the Bible as being devoid of ethical originality, without interesting stories, and badly written.

"It's very one-dimensional, and people talk about the beauty of the Arabic and so on, but the English translation I read was, from a literary point of view, very disappointing"

I think these are probably the reactions of almost any English person of Faulks's background and education who tries to read the book. Except for the observations on literary merit, they aren't that different from Randolph Churchill's repeated cries, when he read the Old Testament, of "God! What a shit god is!"

Those remarks appeared in the Sunday Times magazine; today he has been backtracking all over the place: in the Telegraph, he said that "There is something of the reporter in most good novelists; our aim, in the end, is always to increase and broaden the reader's understanding, not to inflame a silly prejudice" and in today's Guardian culture blog, he said "I blame myself more than the reporter – or whichever subeditor thought it was good idea to pull out the more undigested bits and try to make a silly season scandal ... I unreservedly apologise to anyone who does feel offended by comments offered in another context."

This is a very high-minded view from a man who was in his day a very energetic and successful journalist. He was a feature writer on the Sunday Telegraph when I first met him, and later the literary editor of the Independent. It shouldn't be entirely shocking to him that sub-editors pick out juicy quotes.

So far the story is familiar. But there is one element missing almost entirely, and that is widespread, or almost any Muslim outrage. The whole story is played out against the backdrop of the Rushdie affair. Yet where is the comparable fury against Faulks? My guess is that there won't be any, and this represents some real progress – and one thing less attractive. The real progress comes from the fact that British Muslims have grown more tolerant of the ordinary rough and tumble of public life. This is partly a growth in self-confidence; partly, perhaps, a fear of backlash. But in any case, it is a real and positive development. The other element, of course, is that Faulks is not himself a Muslim, and never has been. Rushdie was an apostate, and that was both the judicial basis of the fatwa against him, and the emotional basis of the hatred directed at him. He was a traitor. Faulks is just an outsider. He will be largely ignored. It's not as if, in either case, the protests came from people who read the books.